Modernization, nationalism and Islam: an examination of Ernest Gellner's writings on Muslim society with reference to Indonesia and Malaysia

Ernest Gellner's Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals models the development of Western civil society in contrast with the failed Marxist experiment and Islamic fundamentalism. In the tradition of his work on nationalism, industrialization is cited as the structural catalyst of modern social orders. Muslim society, however, is unique for Gellner in its synchronicity of societal culture and the Islamic faith: the historic internal division of Islam into a High and Low version reacts to modernity by generating a High Muslim culture in a nation of Islam. While other world religions secularize and allow the development of individual nations based on ethnic cultures, Muslim societies are always anchored to their faith: This article presents a contrasting view which places ethnicity over religion in the development of a national identity. The relationship of Islam to modernization in rapidly industrializing Indonesia and Malaysia is considered in contrast to Gellner's model.